Developer relations is the function responsible for the relationship between a company and the developers who use its APIs. It sits at an awkward intersection — part engineering, part marketing, part product, part support, part community, and not fully any of them. That ambiguity is both its superpower and its permanent organizational problem.
You need the work immediately. Someone has to answer questions, write the getting-started guide, notice that the auth flow confuses everyone, carry consumer feedback back to engineering, and tell the story of what the platform can do. In a small company that is whoever is closest to the consumers, and it should be an explicit responsibility rather than an accident.
You need the department later, and only if you have an actual ecosystem to relate to. DevRel hired before there is a platform worth advocating for tends to become a content function measured on impressions.
Two things I would say to anyone doing this work. First, its closest neighbor is support, not marketing — the fastest way to be useful to developers is to unblock them. Second, in an API-driven company everyone ends up doing some of this; the internal half, evangelizing to your own organization, is usually where the largest gap is and where the least credit goes.
